Top 180 Scott Lynch Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The only constant in the soul of man is inconstancy; anything and everything else can pass out of fashion-even something as utilitarian as a hill stuffed full of corpses.”

— Scott Lynch

52. “I have always found the presumptions of others to be the best possible disguise – haven’t you?”

— Scott Lynch

53. “Privileges of age, size, and ass-kissing. If you survive this conversation, you’ll find that it’s just the same in most of the big gangs.”

— Scott Lynch

54. “I desire you as deeply as I ever have, but I understand that the fervor of a desire is irrelevant to its justice.”

— Scott Lynch

55. “I want you to use your misplaced acorn of a brain before the squirrel comes looking for it again.”

— Scott Lynch

56. “And for all our sakes, tame that mess on top of your head. Use fire and a poleaxe if you have to.”

— Scott Lynch

57. “Are you smarter than a pig, Locke?” “On occasion,” said Locke. “There are contrary opinions.” “Are you more dangerous than a cow? A chicken? A sheep?” “Let’s be generous and say yes.”

— Scott Lynch

58. “Like celestial bodies, transiting in their orbits, exerting their influences.”

— Scott Lynch

59. “Listen, if you walk into a whorehouse and find yourself getting sucked off, it’s because you put some money on the counter, not because the gods transported a pair of lips to your cock.”

— Scott Lynch

60. “Go fold yourself in half,” said Locke, “and lick your ass.”

— Scott Lynch

61. “You’d have to take your shoes and breeches off to count to twenty-one!”

— Scott Lynch

62. “I suspect this is all gonna end in screaming and drowning.”

— Scott Lynch

63. “Of your friend, I can find no trace,” said the man. “He seems to have been eaten by one of the thin hairless apes from the Okanti isles; all it does is screech at me. What became of the last leech to take a look at him?” “We left him in Talisham,” said Jean. “I’m afraid my friend’s attitude moved him to bring an early end to his own sea voyage.” “Well, I might have done the same. I waive my fee, in profound sympathy. Keep your silver – you shall need it for wine. Or poison.”

— Scott Lynch

64. “I practise selective deafness to hurtful remarks.”

— Scott Lynch

65. “Lies go out, but the truth stays home.”

— Scott Lynch

66. “It’s easy to prescribe remedies for our own weaknesses when they’re comfortably ensconced in other people.”

— Scott Lynch

67. “Hardships are arbitrary, Locke. You never know which particular quality in yourself or a fellow is going to get you past them.”

— Scott Lynch

68. “The water caught the Falselight glimmer like layers of shifting, translucent mirrors and formed split-second works of art in the air, but men cursed it anyway, because it made their heads wet.”

— Scott Lynch

69. “Our patron has always sort of danced upon the notion that austerity and piety go hand in hand; down here, we show our appreciation for things by appreciating, if you get me.”

— Scott Lynch

70. “Nobody admires anyone else without qualification. If they do they’re after an image, not a person.”

— Scott Lynch

71. “Not everything that’s inevitable is regrettable.”

— Scott Lynch

72. “Singua solus.” “What’s that?” said Jenora. “It’s an old Camorri tradition for when a bunch of people are planning something stupid,” said Locke. “Actually, we have a lot of traditions for that. You’ll find out.”

— Scott Lynch

73. “Set foot in our house again,” said Sofia, “and you’ll become a permanent feature in my laboratory.”

— Scott Lynch

74. “Mew,” the kitten retorted, locking gazes with him. It had the expression common to all kittens, that of a tyrant in the becoming. ‘I was comfortable, and you dared to move,’ those jade eyes said. ‘For that you must die.’ When it became apparent to the cat that its two or three pounds of mass were insufficient to break Locke’s neck with one mighty snap, it put its paws on his shoulders and began sharing its drool-covered nose with his lips. He recoiled.”

— Scott Lynch

75. “It was easy to laugh at such conceits in full daylight. But night had a way of lending weight to phantasms.”

— Scott Lynch

76. “Oh, you know me.” Jean reached behind his neck, down behind the loose leather vest he wore over his simple cotton tunic. He withdrew a pair of matching hatchets, each a foot and a half in length, with leather-wrapped handles and straight black blades that narrowed like scalpels. These were balanced with balls of blackened steel, each as wide around as a silver solon. The Wicked Sisters – Jean’s weapons of choice. “I never travel alone. It’s always the three of us.”

— Scott Lynch

77. “Money makes a man mirthful.”

— Scott Lynch

78. “Well, it certainly is nice to be free from the threat of that lamp, my boy.” Chains drew a last breath of smoke, then rubbed his dwindling sheaf of tobacco out against the roof stones. “Was it informing for the duke? Plotting to murder us?”

— Scott Lynch

79. “Gentlemen Bastards.′ hissed Locke,′ do not abandon one another, and we do not run when we owe vengeance.”

— Scott Lynch

80. “In the glass burrow beneath their feet, the flames began to rise. First the flames, and then the screams.”

— Scott Lynch

81. “Jean... you are a greater friend than I ever could have imagined before I met you; I owe you my life too many times over to count. I would rather be dead myself than lose you. Not just because you’re all I have left.”

— Scott Lynch

82. “If your father says “Bark like a dog”, I say “What breed your honor.”

— Scott Lynch

83. “I mean, wouldn’t it be grand, to have a legend that grew while you were alive to enjoy it? To sit in a tavern and hear all the people around you speaking of what you’d done, with no notion that you were among them as flesh and blood?”

— Scott Lynch

84. “You have to be a dead-eyed dirty-souled maniac to want to spend your extended life trading punches with other maniacs. Once you’ve seized that power, there’s no getting off the merry-go-round. You fight like hell just to hold on or you get shoved off.”

— Scott Lynch

85. “Ravelle, anyone in command feigns ease when death is near. We do it for those around us, and we do it for ourselves. We do it because the sole alternative is to die cringing.”

— Scott Lynch

86. “The difference between honest and dishonest commerce is that when an honest man or woman of business ruins someone, they don’t have the courtesy to cut their throat to finish the affair.”

— Scott Lynch

87. “Liquor does this? Even after you’re sober?” “A cruel joke, isn’t it? The gods put a price tag on everything, it seems.”

— Scott Lynch

88. “I can be very loud, when I’m being stupid.”

— Scott Lynch

89. “Familiarity has a way of filing the sharp edges off our feelings for other people. You’ll see.”

— Scott Lynch

90. “I heartedly approve, in theory,” said Ibelius, “but in practice I believe I shall... absent myself.”

— Scott Lynch

91. “Woman, your heart is a mapless maze. Could I bottle confusion and drink it a thousand years, I could not confound myself so much as you do between waking and breakfast. You are grown so devious that serpents would applaud your passage, would the gods but give them hands.”

— Scott Lynch

92. “But time’s a river, Locke, and we’ve always drifted farther down it than we think.”

— Scott Lynch

93. “Heavens,” said Galdo in a deep, dramatic voice, “only one man living could have squeezed forth such a gleaming brown jewel – this is the work of Squatting Calo, the Midnight Shitter!”

— Scott Lynch

94. “These are my cards on the table. I think you’re beautiful. I feel like I’m an idiot with dirt on his face sitting next to someone out of a painting. I think... I think I’m just plain stupid for you. I know that’s not exactly sweet talk out of a play. Frankly, I’d kiss your shadow. I’d kiss dirt that had your heel print on it. I like feeling this way. I don’t give a damn what you or anyone else thinks... this is how it feels every time I look at you.”

— Scott Lynch

95. “ETIENNE DELANCARRE Domingo Salvard,” said Sabetha, reading out loud from the lantern-lit plaque beside the building’s street entrance. “Master solicitor, bonded law-scribe, authorized notary, executor of wills and estates, Vadran translator and transcriber. Fortunes assured, justice delivered, enemies confounded. Reasonable rates.” Locke.”

— Scott Lynch

96. “It smelled something like a keg of bad beer overturned in a mortician’s storage room on a hot summer’s day.”

— Scott Lynch

97. “He was bewildered at how quickly he had escaped his old life and fallen into this new one with strangely pleasant crazy people.”

— Scott Lynch

98. “You’re ten pints of crazy in a one-pint glass.”

— Scott Lynch

99. “This web of lies was growing so convoluted, so branching, and so delicate that a moth’s fart might knock it to pieces –.”

— Scott Lynch

100. “He should have died a few seconds later. It was Jean, as usual, who had other plans.”

— Scott Lynch